February 11, 2005

6-4-3

Farewell

by Gary Huckabay

Time for me to go.

It's been nearly 10 years. They've been great. Great and hard. I've met people, made friends, had fun, picked up an ulcer, accomplished all the original goals, established some new ones along the way, grown a couple of businesses, made some mistakes, talked to literally thousands of baseball fans, been called pretty much every flattering and unflattering thing a guy can be called, and just generally had a blast.

You can only come back once, and I've done that already. So this is farewell and thank you. Because of you, I've been presented with a number of opportunities that once seemed impossible. I owe BP's readers and contributors a debt I can never adequately repay. So all I can say is thank you: to the BPers, present, past and future; to the readers, whose love for the game permeates every e-mail, either supportive or angry, and to everyone else who's been so generous with their time, energy and spirit, often when I gave them little reason to be.

From a practical standpoint, I'll be completely purging all my contact info from baseballprospectus.com fairly soon. Not surprisingly, after being hit by a ton of spiders, my huckabay@baseballprospectus.com e-mail account gets more spam than any reasonable e-mail server can handle, so it's going away in a couple of weeks, as I switch ISPs and become considerably less visible. But I'd like to keep in touch with the couple of thousand of you who've taken the time to write in and share their thoughts. So, if you want to be included in my plaxo universe, write in, and I'll make sure to write back and keep you on my contact list.

These last few years have been the most demanding and rewarding of my life. The genuine and lifelong friends I've made thanks to all of you is the second greatest gift anyone could ask for, and I really am grateful.

As for the absolute greatest gift, I offer two final photos. This is my son, Charles Joel Schofield, gazing on the visage of Dwayne Murphy, God's own center fielder, and putting up with an overprotective dad at Grandma and Grandpa's house. It's not a good picture of me, but it doesn't have to be.

Pitchers and Catchers report in what seems like just moments. How lucky am I?

Thanks again, everybody.

--Gary

Gary Huckabay is an author of Baseball Prospectus. 
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